Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) sharply criticized War Secretary Pete Hegseth following reports of an alleged verbal follow-up strike order he gave in September to “kill everybody” after the first strike on an alleged drug trafficking boat left survivors in the water.
Kelly, a Navy veteran and member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, appeared on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday morning after the committee announced a “vigorous oversight” investigation into the reported order from Hegseth.
In response to a question from CNN’s Dana Bash over whether or not a second strike to eliminate any survivors “constitutes a war crime,” Kelly responded, “It seems to.”
“If that is true, if what has been reported is accurate, I’ve got serious concerns about anybody in that chain of command stepping over a line that they should never step over. We are not Russia, we’re not Iraq. We hold ourselves to a very high standard of professionalism,” Kelly said of a Washington Post report that Hegseth gave the alleged follow-up “kill everybody” order after the first Sept. 2 strike left two survivors hanging on to the suspected drug-trafficking boat.
Hegseth and the War Department have denied the reports as “fake news,” calling them “fabricated, inflammatory, and derogatory.”
“As we’ve said from the beginning, and in every statement, these highly effective strikes are specifically intended to be ‘lethal, kinetic strikes.’ The declared intent is to stop lethal drugs, destroy narco-boats, and kill the narco-terrorists who are poisoning the American people. Every trafficker we kill is affiliated with a Designated Terrorist Organization,” Hegseth wrote on X.
Kelly himself has been under scrutiny after he and five other Democratic lawmakers made a video to urge U.S. servicemembers to refuse unspecified illegal orders. The past couple of weeks have been tumultuous for Kelly after President Donald Trump suggested the video was “seditious” and “punishable by death,” and Hegseth ordered an investigation into Kelly’s comments in the video.
Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK), also of the Senate Armed Services Committee, appeared on the Sunday show after Kelly and questioned the validity of the report, which recounted information from anonymous sources familiar with the operation.
“I don’t think this story is accurate,” Mullin said of the report.
HEGSETH’S REPORTED ‘KILL EVERYBODY’ ORDER IN DRUG BOAT STRIKE DRAWS SENATE SCRUTINY
“I don’t know if I believe that at all because we’re doing alleged sources, nothing has been verified by this. We do know that a survivor that did survive in later attacks was picked up by the United States Coast Guard or Navy, I’m not for sure, and was sent back to his country. You guys reported on that. So I doubt, very seriously, that took place,” Mullin said.
Mullin was referring to an October strike in which two alleged narcoterrorists survived and were repatriated by the U.S. military to Colombia and Ecuador for prosecution.
